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Nick Touran
I think giving small groups of retirees veto power over building anything and everything was a bad idea.
Who has good ideas about how to undo this?
Aug 16, 05:12
This is what’s wrong with our permitting system:
A single NIMBY retiree can spend all her time suing to block wind & transmission projects from being built.
Activists used these same rules to block nuclear projects in the 1970s.
Now they’re being used against all clean energy.
12.26K
Fascinating episode!
I listened to it today on the train to go meet up with someone and catch up. When we met up, he had been listening to it on his train ride too!
Aug 15, 01:14
This week, we travel to the edge of the map with Aleksandr Surtcev , an engineer who has crewed Russian nuclear icebreakers along the Northern Sea Route.
We explore how Russia’s Arctic fleet keeps this strategic corridor open, why floating nuclear plants are powering remote communities and mines, and what life looks like in a place where polar bears trail ships for fish and resupply markets pop up on the ice.
Beneath the stories lies a deeper discussion of geopolitics, engineering, and the hard logistics of operating in one of the most unforgiving regions on Earth.
4.51K
I recently asked AI to help me find original publications explaining the underlying physical reason why TRIGA reactors aren't generally used for power production, and it straight up invented plausible-sounding quotes out of appropriately titled IAEA TECDOCs that simply did not exist when I went looking. Yikes! I've found that LLMs are absolutely mind-bendingly useful and amazing, but please oh please do not assume their answers about even slightly nuanced nuclear things are even remotely accurate. At least not yet.
Aug 13, 19:19
Not news, but AI can provide some odd answers that might be completely wrong.
I asked Google AI about the difference in initial fuel load for fast reactors compared to thermal reactors.
As a Navy Nuke trained in arrow analysis - go ahead and ask - I thought I knew that fast reactors need higher fuel loads to go critical and that's one of the reasons nearly all commercial reactors are thermal.
I was seeking to quantify my assumption.
But Google AI told me that "Fast reactors require significantly less initial uranium fuel loading compared to thermal reactors to achieve the same power output."
Am I wrong or is the AI hallucinating again?
6.9K
Nick Touran reposted
In 2020 before the whole world shut down because of COVID, Nick and I met up for a drink at a bar in Seattle.
He was the first nuclear industry insider I talked to about Isodope, and—to my surprise—he told me he was happy to help.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve only been able to make content and write this book because of him.
Firstly, because his website whatisnuclear .com has all the information one could ever need about nuclear.
Secondly, because he has patiently responded to every annoying/dumb question I’ve asked and fact checked every manuscript I’ve written.
22.63K
Sounds like we need a consortium of nuclear-loving super high revenue companies to team up and build 10 big reactors and 100 little ones.
Aug 13, 05:08
This is coming from Duke, the country’s second largest nuclear energy operator. Utilities avoiding all project risk is untenable for large scale deployment. These issues need to be resolved and the solutions might not be what you think.
7.69K
Big fan of @FrameworkPuter and their repairable laptops. We have two of them, and I've convinced a few others to get one as well. But I'm having a pretty frustrating experience with mine now. On July 13, it stopped turning on. No lights, nothing! I did the normal debugging and opened a ticket. They walked me through more debugging and asked for lots of photos and videos. By July 22 had me remove my SSD and expansion cards and mail it in. They received it on the 24th, found that there was a RAM issue, and I got the repaired laptop yesterday, Aug 7th. But when I put my expansion cards and SSD back in and went to turn it on, it was still totally dead! Has anyone else had this problem? Maybe one of my expansion cards is killing the RAM?
1.55K
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